Portrait of a Man in Oriental Costume

The museum in Besançon lists this canvas as a portrait of a man in Oriental dress, known as the portrait of Mustapha. That is the name handed down for a man who worked in Géricault's household in Paris in the late 1810s, remembered as his Turkish servant, and a watercolour in the Louvre carries it too. Géricault was not the only artist drawn to such a sitter at the time. Anne-Louis Girodet, a generation older, made his own study of a turbaned man in 1819, and the Girodet museum in Montargis suggests it may show the same model, without insisting on it. Here the man's eyes slide hard to one side under a striped turban wound over a red cap, and a red waistcoat shows at his open collar. The canvas came to Besançon from the collection of Jean Gigoux, a painter born in the city.